Oz Spellman
December 11, 2020 5:39 AM
Special delivery by Oz Spellman
Oz thought this was a good plan. The evidence that it was not was… well, that. He had thought of it all by himself, and it made sense to him, and those things kinda had a habit of biting him in the backside, though apparently never quite thoroughly enough for him to have stopped having more ideas. And he had tried to do what Mom and Henry said and really think about it - he had had time, after all whilst running his experiments - and he had gone through it several times in his head and he couldn’t see any issues.Well, he had been able to see two, but he had solved them both. The first was the possibility of the food going bad. Food did that sometimes. And there weren’t any fridges at school and nothing even came wrapped in plastic, it was all just kinda there. Bread and bread stuffs, he had found, went bad quicker than he had expected. Not like mouldy or inedible but they got tough really fast and definitely weren’t anywhere near as good by the next day. Still, he’d grabbed a couple of rolls and some pastries at breakfast that day, and he hoped they’d be okay. He wasn’t totally sure how long this would take, but he thought probably not long because he’d gotten here within a few hours. Fruits worked well, and he’d taken a few apples over the preceding couple of days, and the cookies stayed okay, and who didn’t love cookies? He now put the haul from breakfast in the box beside them.
He’d asked Professor Carter-Xavier for the box, and she had given him one and not asked why he wanted it, which he was glad about. Not that he was doing anything he could be in trouble for (he hoped) but it was still kinda private. He had asked her rather than any of the other students though because he still wasn’t totally sure who was safe, and he didn’t really want to owe the wrong person a favour. That was actually a third thing that he’d thought about without even realising that he’d thought about it!
The second had been whether this was stealing. Stealing was very bad, both because it would lead to trouble but also because it was morally wrong – and anyone who tried to persuade you otherwise was a bad influence, and possibly grooming you to recruit you to a gang by seeing if you were the kind of person who would do what they said, or the kind of person who would say no and walk away. Oz did not want to be someone who stole. The fact that he didn’t feel bad about taking the food made him feel like it must not count as stealing. Normally, his intuition about what was safe and smart was not the most brilliant, but he did know right from wrong. It was hard to feel bad about taking food when there was more of it than they could ever eat, and when wizards seemed to be able to conjure it up out of nowhere. If you stole from a shop, the shop lost money. Wizards weren’t losing money. Plus, he could have eaten the food that was in the box now. No one would have minded if he had done that, so why would they mind him having it for something else? It didn’t work like that with stores. You couldn’t eat food in the aisle and then argue that you weren’t stealing because you hadn’t removed it from the store. So this was different, and not stealing.
He added a letter to the box, which he had written the previous night. It had been pretty hard work. A lot of his thoughts sounded stupid on paper. A lot of his thoughts probably sounded stupid out loud too, but they were over quickly so it didn’t really matter. When you actually had to make the effort of writing them, you really had to think about what you were saying. He and Henry had written home a few times together, but then he had Henry’s help to work out what to say. He didn’t want to make it sound like school was so great that he didn’t miss home, but he also didn’t want to say he missed home so much that he made Mom worry. They both felt that, but Henry was usually the one who took charge of striking that balance. Oz just added colourful details, like saying that Potions smelled like weird farts, which he had argued was completely valid and hilarious, and was like a simile or whatever. But that stuff only worked if you had the rest of the letter around it. Like a lot of things, it didn’t feel like it worked very well when he tried to do it by himself. But, like a lot of things, he apparently had to get used to trying to deal with that. He’d mostly ended up talking about the box.
Dear Mom,
How’s it going?
I made you a care package. It was kind of tricky because they don’t put stuff in packets here. I wasn’t sure what would be good to send, and I wanted it to be a surprise but if you have any suggestions, I can do it again, and make it better next time. You should probably eat the bread and pastries first because they go hard quickly. Or put them in a tin. I don’t have a tin.
I got the box from Professor Carter-Xavier. I told you a bit about her in my letter with Henry. She’s pretty cool.
School’s still weird (especially the smell in potions, lol) and I miss you. But I’m okay.
Lots of love,
Oz.
OOC: Permission about the box gained from Prof C-X
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Oz Spellman
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